by Linda Seed
“Yeah,” Rose agreed. “She tried to hate him, but once she tasted his steak she couldn’t keep it up anymore.”
“That happens a lot with Jackson.” Daniel tapped his knuckles on the counter. “Well, ladies, I’ve got to go. I’ve been commissioned to make a ceiling fixture for a casino in Vegas. Like the one at the Bellagio, only a lot cheaper.”
“You’re the cut-rate Chihuly now?” Lacy wanted to know.
“Hey, I’ll take it,” Daniel said cheerfully. “It pays the mortgage.”
He grabbed his coffee cup, gave them a friendly wave, and headed out the door. Lacy leaned precariously over the counter to watch him go.
“Hey. Are you checking out Daniel’s ass?” Rose’s voice held a hard edge of accusation.
“So what if I am? It’s a nice one.”
“I suppose. Is there something going on there I should know about?”
“No.” Lacy eased herself back to the floor behind the counter. “I’ve just been celibate for so long that a nice ass makes me dizzy.”
“Huh. Maybe there should be something going on there,” Rose offered.
“Look who’s talking.” Lacy looked at her pointedly. “Miss I’m done with men, but I can’t keep my hands off Will. You need to get your own love life under control before you worry about mine.”
Lacy had a point. What was the worst that could happen if Rose were to give up the pretense and start seeing Will for real? How bad could it be?
Rose thought that if she were really going to give up her man moratorium, it would have made more sense to start with some eye candy she didn’t give a crap about. Too late for that. Will had gotten under her skin, like a mosquito, or a heat rash. She figured that any way she looked at it, she was pretty much screwed.
Will busied himself fixing the pool filter at Cooper House, because it was easier than working on his dissertation, and it was certainly easier than thinking about Rose. The filter had been wonky for a while now, and he probably should have just brought in a pool guy to take care of it. But Will figured he ought to do something to earn his salary around here, and anyway, the work gave him something to occupy his mind so he wouldn’t think about his woman problems.
That was the idea, anyway. The trouble was, filter or no filter, he was still thinking about his woman problems.
There was a small problem, and then there was a big problem.
The small problem—which would have been the big problem under other circumstances—was Melinda. After the kiss in the wine cellar, he’d thought the issue was done with. He’d made it clear he wasn’t going there, and that should have been the end of it. But she had texted him several times since then, each message more suggestive and then hostile than the last.
She’d started off simply enough, with a text that said, I’m thinking about you. Will had black-holed it, deleting the text and deciding to pretend it had never happened. Just like the kiss. The next text, about a day later, had said, We both know you want me back. You’re just scared. Part of that was true, anyway: the part about him being scared. He was scared of losing his job and his place of residence if Chris got wind of what Will’s crazy ex was trying to do. The part about wanting her back? Not a snowball’s chance inside an active volcano.
He’d stuck with the strategy of ignoring her, but that had just seemed to make her mad. The texts after that took on an angry tone.
You’re pathetic.
I wonder what other body parts she has pierced.
And finally, alarmingly:
Fuck you fuck you FUCK YOU!!! >:(
He thought the emoticon was a nice touch. Very mature.
He was increasingly puzzled by the why of it. Melinda was with Chris now. He seemed to be everything she wanted. So why the anger toward Will? And why now?
Will thought about it as he worked on the pool filter under a sky that was clear and bright. He’d disassembled the filter, cleaned it, and reassembled it, and there was still water leaking out of the backwash line. His shorts were dotted with pool water, and he smelled like chlorine.
If he’d had a pet rabbit, he reflected, he might worry about coming home one day to find Melinda boiling it in a pot on his stove. But since he didn’t have a rabbit—or any pet, for that matter—he stopped worrying about that and started thinking about Rose.
The big problem.
Rose wanting to sleep with him would not have been a problem of any size—it would have been cause for jubilation—if it weren’t for the fact that he had fallen for her. He was willing to settle for second best in many areas of his life. His career path wasn’t going the way he wanted, and he hadn’t expected to still be a student at twenty-nine. So there was that. But he wasn’t going to settle when it came to Rose. Either she’d sleep with him because she was falling for him, too, or it wasn’t going to happen at all.
He really hated to think that it might not happen at all.
She’d started as a small thing in his life—a small but pleasant thing—but the place she held in his world was gradually getting bigger and bigger until he worried that she would eclipse everything else.
And that would be okay, would be great, even, if she decided she felt about him the way he felt about her. But if she didn’t—if she kept on with her insistence that she was finished with men—then the enormous space she took up in his mind and in his heart was going to be filled with pain and unbearable longing, and he didn’t know how we was going to get by day to day like that.
He’d just have to work the problem.
He knew a little about why Rose was so down on the idea of a relationship. She’d had a breakup, and it had hurt her. He didn’t know much more than that. Maybe if he knew—if he understood the root of the hurt—then he would know how to make her trust him.
In any case, it was better to have information than not to have it.
He disliked the idea of sneaking around behind her back to ask her friends about her, but he thought it was going to come to that. Rose wouldn’t tell him herself.
With pieces of the faulty pool filter in his hands, he decided he’d have to do it. He’d have to ask Kate, or maybe Lacy. Or, if they wouldn’t talk to him, maybe Kate had told Jackson, and he could go that route.
Little by little, he began putting the filter back together, hoping that if he just applied himself to the issue, he could fix whatever was wrong.
Chapter Eighteen
“Ah, jeez, Will. I don’t know.”
Will had come into Swept Away, Kate’s bookstore on Main Street, during a morning lull. The shop was empty except for Kate and Jane Austen, the Swept Away cat. Jane Austen was curled up on the counter next to the cash register, and Kate was stocking shelves with new books she was unloading from a cardboard carton.
“Look. I know it’s a lot to ask. Whatever she told you, she told you in confidence. I get that. But … I just want to understand. She’s got this whole ‘no men’ thing going on, and I know it has nothing to do with me. But it also has everything to do with me, because I’m … Okay. I might as well say it. I’m in love with her, and I can’t get out of the friend zone.”
Kate paused from her work, both hands full of books. “You’re in love with her?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “I think I am. No, forget that. Who am I kidding? I know I am.”
She put the books in their place on the shelf, then turned to him, hands on her hips, her eyes appraising him. She was looking at him the way his mother used to when he’d done something wrong and she was deciding whether to ground him.
Kate sighed. “You can’t tell her I told you this. Or, wait. Yes, you can. I don’t want to keep secrets from my friends.”
“Okay.”
Kate went to the front counter, scooped Jane Austen into her arms, and then sat in one of the leather chairs she provided for customers who wanted to sit and read. Will sat in the chair across from her as Jane Austen settled into Kate’s lap.
“Rose was dating this guy named Jeremy,” Kate began.
“Do I know him?”
“I don’t think so,” Kate said. “He’s a professor at the university in San Luis Obispo. They were together for a few months.”
Will waited. Kate’s hesitation before she continued made him think the story was going to be a bad one.
“At first, it was good,” Kate said. “Or, it seemed like it was. Rose seemed happy, and Jeremy seemed … Well. I won’t say I took an immediate liking to him, but I didn’t see any red flags, either.”
“But then?” Will prompted her.
Kate sighed again. “But then, she started to change.”
“Change, how?”
“Her clothes, first. She started dressing more conservatively. Her skirts got longer, her tops started showing less cleavage. She started wearing things that were … less quirky. Less Rose.”
He could see where this was going, and it made him feel a little sick.
“Then, the piercings. She took the one out of her eyebrow first. Then the nose ring went. Then the ones from her ears. Finally, they were all gone except for a single stud in each ear.”
“Which he gave her,” Will guessed.
“You’re catching on fast,” Kate said. “Then it was the hair. Of course. He wanted her to dye it this medium brown, which she says is her natural color. Even though she didn’t do it, by the time he broke up with her, all of these pieces of her had been chipped away until I don’t think she felt like she had much left.”
“But why?” Will wanted to know. “Why did she do all of that? Why didn’t she say no? Was it … Did she love him that much?”
Kate considered that, then shook her head. “No. She thought she loved him, but I don’t think she really did.”
“Then what?”
Kate paused for a moment and scratched between Jane Austen’s ears. The cat purred in response. Finally, she said, “The thing about Rose is, she’s got this tough exterior. This I don’t give a damn what you think of me persona. But under all that, she just wants to be accepted, like we all do.”
“And acceptance is something her mother has never given her,” Will added.
“Right.”
They sat there quietly for a moment while Will thought about what Kate was saying.
“Aposematism,” he said finally.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s … animals sometimes use conspicuous coloring as a defense mechanism. Like the red milk snake. Its markings mimic the coral snake, which is highly venomous. The red milk snake is harmless, but its bright coloring warns predators away.” Will straightened his glasses.
Kate pointed a finger at Will. “Now you’re catching on, professor.”
Professor.
“Oh, God,” Will said.
“What?”
“You said her previous boyfriend was a professor. I’m not one yet, but that’s where I’m headed.”
Kate paused in midscratch. “Oh. Shit. I hadn’t even thought of that.”
“She’s flashing her bright coloring at me, hoping I’ll get scared and go away instead of eating her,” Will concluded.
“So, what are you going to do?” Kate asked.
“I’ve got to find some way to convince her I’m not a predator,” he said.
He just wished he knew how to do that.
The day after the barbecue at Pamela’s rental house, Pamela called Rose to complain about the fact that her tasteful menu had been taken over by the common food one might find at a suburban birthday party. She complained about the impertinent way Will had spoken to her. She also complained about the amount of time Rose had spent elsewhere, first retrieving Will from the side of Highway 1, and then huddling with him outside on the patio, whispering like teenagers keeping secrets. She complained that Rose had seemed out of sorts after Will had left, a fact that Pamela had taken as a personal affront. And finally, she complained that with Rose having returned to work, Pamela was left alone and at loose ends, with nothing to do in the small beach town.
“Is there anything you’re not unhappy about?” Rose demanded over the phone at De-Vine after Pamela listed her grievances.
“Well,” Pamela allowed, “Jackson’s steak was heavenly.”
Rose didn’t know if she should be pleased that Pamela had found something to be happy about, or angry because it had been someone else, rather than Rose, who had managed to accomplish that.
“Of course, you’re coming over when you finish work,” Pamela had concluded when she’d run out of criticism.
“I am?”
“Rosemary,” Pamela said in a voice weary with impatience. “I didn’t come all the way across the country to sit in a shack by myself.”
“Why did you come?” Rose asked.
“Rosemary.”
“No, Mom, I mean it. You don’t seem to enjoy spending time with me, so, really, why did you come here?”
Pamela ignored the question. “What time should I expect you?”
“I … I can’t come over. I have a date with Will,” Rose said.
“Do you.” She said it as a statement rather than a question.
“Yes.” As soon as I tell him about it, she thought.
“I’m not certain about this young man,” Pamela said.
“Color me surprised.”
“Rosemary.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Rose said. “He’s … taking me for a walk at Moonstone Beach and then for dinner at Linn’s. We have reservations. I can’t just back out.”
“You’re taking me for a walk at Moonstone Beach and then for dinner at Linn’s,” Rose told Will as soon as she could get him on the phone. “But it’s my treat. I know you’re probably broke, with the car repairs and whatnot.”
Will was actually at that moment waiting for a call from his mechanic with a diagnosis and a quote for repairs. When his phone rang, that’s who he’d been expecting. He’d had the car towed to the shop and had been borrowing one of the vehicles Chris kept at Cooper House until he could get his fixed.
“Well, I suppose that’ll work for me.” He wondered to what he owed this sudden windfall of time with Rose. “But what brought this on?”
“I told my mother I had a date with you. Now … you know. I have to go on a date with you. Otherwise, I lied to her. And people shouldn’t lie to their mothers.”
The corner of his mouth quirked up in a half smile. “I suppose they shouldn’t. But why specifically Moonstone Beach and then Linn’s?”
“Because that’s what I told my mother. I had to tell her something.”
Will picked Rose up at De-Vine when she got off work at six thirty. He’d had to leave his car at the shop overnight, so he was driving the Ford F-150 Chris kept at Cooper House. The truck got used when Will needed to haul something or other in his capacity as caretaker, or when Chris was in town, or when one of Chris’s friends was using the house and needed a way to get around. Now, Will was grateful that it was available. It would have hurt his manhood if he’d had to ask Rose to drive.
Because she’d told her mother that they’d be walking on Moonstone Beach, that was the first thing they did. Seemed like as good a place to start a date as any.
The sun was still high in the western sky when they got there, and a good number of tourists were walking on the sand with their pant legs rolled up and their shoes in their hands, or were sitting on the benches that lined the boardwalk.
The temperature in Cambria usually averaged around the midsixties in May, but it had been warmer than that, and so it was mild and comfortable as they climbed down a set of stairs off Moonstone Beach Drive and descended to the sand.
You couldn’t walk very far on Moonstone Beach before you hit the bluffs or the rocks with their tide pools full of tiny crabs and sea anemones, so they walked on the sand a little bit and then climbed the stairs back up onto the boardwalk, then walked up there amid the tourists, the early evening joggers, and the squirrels that scurried along the path in front of them.
Somewhere along the way, Will reach
ed out and took Rose’s hand. He wasn’t sure she would let him. They’d kissed several times, sure, but that could be explained away as impulse. If she allowed him to hold her hand, here on the beach as the sun lowered toward the water, then that would be a deliberate decision, an acknowledgment that he intended to be close to her, and she intended to let him, if only a little.
When he reached out and placed his palm in hers, then wrapped his fingers around hers, he felt her hesitate, and he waited to see which way it would go. Then she glanced at him, grinned slightly, and tightened her grip on his hand.
It felt good, holding her hand. It felt right. It felt as though his hand had found its right place in the universe, among all of the possible places it could be. It had found its home.
They continued along the boardwalk and over the bridge, and came to a stop at Leffingwell Landing, the park that stood at the northern edge of Moonstone Beach. At a picnic bench, they stopped and sat, looking out at the water and the crashing waves.
“I’m glad we’re having a date,” Will said. “Even if we’re only doing it to get you away from your mother.”
“Well,” she said, “she’s going to be here a month. So, we might have to move in together.”
“I wouldn’t mind that.” He grinned. “Even though, you know. It would be fake living together.”
She looked at the beach spread out before them, and her eyebrows furrowed. “I’m sorry about how she acted when we had everyone over. The way she treated you. She … I don’t know. She’s not a bad person. She’s just used to living a certain way, you know? I thought …”
“You thought what?”
“Well. My father died about five years ago. I thought that without him there—without the need for her to be the perfect wife for him—she might relax a little. Stop being so status-conscious. But it didn’t work out that way.” A light breeze blew off of the water and tousled her hair.
“It could still. Five years isn’t much when it comes to grief. Looking at it from the outside, you think, a year. That’s what it’s going to take for someone to get over the loss and move on. But a year is nothing. It’s … a blip.”